Our last stop before Cooktown and the Cape was Lakeland, where we said goodbye to our “motel on wheels”. Lakeland is a strange little place with a coffeehouse seconding as general store, post office and service station and a hotel, of course!
The caravan park is split into two. One part is for the tourists and the storage of vans for travellers heading to the tip. The other is occupied by 40 odd back-packers, living in dongas and working on the banana plantations.
Being a Friday, the hotel soon filled up with a big group of backpackers spending part of their pay on beers and jaeger shots. A plate full of prawns, salad and rice could be purchased for $15 for those who were hungry.
The caravan park was terrorised by a young goose and, after dark, by multiple cane toads. One of the park employees, in between his beers, was chasing the cane toads down and killing them with a spate. They were just left there where they were squashed.
As the temperatures still dropped a bit at night (to a freezing 18 degrees), we sat for a while around the campfire, listening to some bush truths from the locals (comparable to seaman’s yarns!).
The next day the serious repacking from caravan to the car started. Boxes with tools, cooking utensils, swag, bedding - all needed to be packed into "the beast" for our 4 wheel drive trip up North. Some more cane toads lost their lives that night, before we stored our caravan in the early morning and headed off to Cooktown. 
On the way we stopped at Black Mountain, a very unusual site of a mountain covered in fragmented black granite. Short before Cooktown is the turn-off leading to the famous Lions Den Hotel at the end of the dreaded Bloomfield Track. The name of the pub originates from a stowaway in the 1820’s called Daniel who found himself working in the local mine. As he emerged from the tunnel opposite of the pub one of the miners called out: 'Daniel in the Lions Den!”. The name stuck.
Today the walls of the pub are covered with signatures and dust covered clothes of people who mastered the rough Bloomfield 4 wheel drive track. Even a wedding dress is among the memorabilia and was left to the pub by the grateful bride who spend her honeymoon there.
The best view over cooktown is from Grassy Hill Lookout, the very spot from where Captain Cook surveyed the area and realised with desperation, that the only way out of the bay and through the extensive reef is a small path to the North, provided a steady south-easterly is blowing!
Before landing here in June 1770 the HMS Endeavour ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef near Cape Tribulation. After days of scooping out water she was only just saved by fothering the hole with sail cloth, holding long enough to get her to shore for repairs.
Evidence of Cook’s arrival and stories of the original inhabitants of the area are displayed along the Esplanade and on the road to Grassy Hill. Looking at the faces of some of the Aboriginals in town, one wonders if the tourists are seen as a new invasion.
Cooktown is a nice little town full of character and we regretted not having planned a longer stay. But we registered to stay in the Lakefield National Park tomorrow night where our 4 wheel drive adventure to “the Tip" starts. So we might be off-line for a while. Watch this space to see how we went.
